Software giant Oracle has gussied up the second iteration of its own kernel for Ellison's Enterprise Linux distro, dissing Red Hat's own tweak on the mainstream Linux 3.0 kernel.
Back in October 2011, Edward Screven, chief corporate architect at Oracle and the person responsible for the company's Linux operating system and Xen …

COMMENTS

We are here to help, trust us....

OK - so let me get this straight. The new kernel is better than other Linux kernels, but....it may break a variety of software applications or device drivers that run on those other popular Linux versions. And if I buy this, I get to also buy more Oracle/Sun servers and storage and "engineered systems" that will all work faster and better. But I don't seem to get strong compatibility with the whole world of x86 based server systems (Dell, HP, IBM, etc), storage (NetApp, EMC, etc), and software applications that run on, let's say Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Or maybe I do, they seem to say something about some version being compatible with Red Hat, but then I get lost trying to figure out what they are saying.

For that matter, it seems that I may also have issues if I want to use the virtualization market leader VMWare, with these new Oracle software offerings, since they prefer I use their virtualization solution, which has "1-2% market share" (and I think that is market share within Oracle users even). I certainly don't know anyone running Oracle virtualization who also does buy millions of dollars of their other offerings.

This sure feels like a big pain for any software company or corporate application developer who wants to support a wide range of hardware and software options to try and support. I guess that is Oracle's plan, to make everyone buy 100% of everything from Oracle. Which feels like the battle from 40 years ago, but maybe they are smarter than everyone. It will be interesting to see how the sales of their products go over the next 12-18 months as the landscape changes.

Re: We are here to help, trust us....

It's not all bad news. For one, I'm really glad to see Oracle still developing BTRFS. But does that make me want to pick Oracle's RHEL copy over proper RHEL? No. I'm quite happy to see Oracle's tweaks ported into the other Linux releases, should they prove useful and stable, but only if they work on other vendors' kit. I have zero interest in being led up the garden path to Larry's walled garden, thanks.